One good thing about Windows Phone 7 is the metro interface, and among the things that distinguish this interface from its competitors are Live Tiles. Where all other mobile platforms just have the same old stagnant icons, the tiles on WP7 can give the user quite a lot of information at a glance. The home to these Live Tiles is WP7’s Start screen. On the Start screen, you can pin just about anything, ranging from apps to shortcuts, and even webpages. If you have ever pinned a webpage to your phone’s Start screen, you must have noticed that doing so puts a miniature screenshot of the opened page on said screen. This seems out of convention with the interface. With a simple bookmarklet, you can pin the webpage’s favicon or logo to the Start screen instead of a small image of the page.

Web2Tile

The service that lets Mango users avail this functionality is named Web2Tile. Following are step-by-step instructions for setting it up on your device.

Open Internet Explorer.

Go to www.web2tile.com

You will see some instructions on the developer’s page there. Copy the link provided in step 1 of the “How To” section.

Tap the browser’s More button (icon with three dots at the bottom), and from the menu that pops up, select Add to favorites.

Replace the URL there with the one you copied in step 3.

Now, when you go to the page for which you want to create a tile, load the Favorite item created in the previous step (Favorites > Web2Tile).

Wait for the icon to appear within the browser. You don’t have to for it to load all the way. After a few seconds, just stop the loading, and from the More menu, select Pin to Start.

You should now have a tile with he webiste’s logo pinned to the Start screen. We tested the bookmarklet with Google and some other websites, and it really works. Do give it a try; it’s not too complicated to set up, and is a better-looking alternative to the original way the OS pins tiles to the Start screen.